Scandalous Women

Two of my favorite things are history and food, when I can combine them both, I’m in heaven. I dream of doing an American version of the BBC TV-show Supersizers Go. Imagine getting to time-travel through almost four hundred years of American cuisine. I enjoy reading about restaurants such as Delmonico’s and the lobster palaces like Rector’s that used to litter Times Square around the turn of the century. When I travel, I actively search out places, where it’s a café, a pub, or a restaurant that has a sense of history. In New Orleans, I once ate at Antoine’s (which is pretty much a tourist trap now) just because my boyfriend wanted to sit in the same room where they filmed a scene from JFK. So when I learned that the Morris-Jumel mansion had planned an event involving Solomon Northup’s wife, Anne, I quickly signed up. With “12 Years A Slave” nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, it seemed appropriate to have an event that celebrated the woman that he unwillingly left behi...

The Morris-Jumel mansion at night taken by Leanna Renee Hieber   Last November, I decided to do something different for my birthday. Instead of going out for dinner or having drinks at one of my favorite bars, I decided to invite a few friends to join me for a paranormal sleepover at the Morris-Jumel mansion here in Manhattan. The mansion, which is located less than twenty blocks from my house, is one of the oldest structures in Manhattan. It is a jewel of a museum, a pre-revolutionary mansion once owned by Roger Morris, a loyalist who left New York to return to England. The house was then used as George Washington's headquarters for a few months before the British took the city. Later the mansion was bought by a wine merchant by the name of Stephen Jumel, who lived in the mansion with his much younger wife Eliza. You can read guest blogger Audrey Braver's post on Eliza Jumel Burr here . Eliza Jumel was a piece of work to say the least. Not many people know her name...